Time-lapse video taken from International Space Station orbiting Earth at night

It's worth watching the HD version in fullscreen mode.

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.

Time-lapse video taken from International Space Station orbiting Earth at night (Via Laughing Squid)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://nefariousnewt.blogspot.com NefariousNewt

Oh, to be able to do that every day, every 90 minutes.
http://ae4rv.com/ royaltrux

The lightning was particularly cool. The urban light pollution, while pretty from space, is somewhat saddening.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QXWZ5PWRO3XXQK3PL2SUL3MTL4 Jeremy Hamilton
  
  To be fair, that film looked pretty over-exposed– the lights aren’t really that bright to the naked eye.
- http://www.facebook.com/Theismisacrime Stephen Bullock
  
  Complaining about “light pollution” seems ridiculous.
  - http://ae4rv.com/ royaltrux
    
    If you don’t care for stargazing, you are correct.
tylerkaraszewski

The lightning storm was awesome. What is the city with the greenish lights?
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

Or just about anything else, from wasted energy production to disrupted nocturnal species that fill some key ecological niches.
RebNachum

Bah. My heart bleeds for the vampires and goths. On the other hand just think — if we had polluted ourselves past the ability to see, there wouldn’t BE any space program.
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  There’s a lot to wonder about in that idea… if the stars were obscured before even our ability to pollute, say by extra cloud cover, what impact on religion? Would agriculture have been harder to develop? Navigation?
  
  And while on the questions, why isn’t there a live stream of this gob-smacking view?!
GuyInMilwaukee

We’ve been in space for how long and this is the first time-lapse around the globe?
NASA needs a marketing team.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=607675355 Brent Kirkham
  
  Wanna see Enceladus, Titan, Saturn, Io, oh and the other moons of a single planet. Saturn. Then there’s Jupiter, Venus, Mars (with twitter feed) Voyager just left the solar system. Probably launched when you had no idea of continence, but hey, still going strong.
  
  “You want links? You can’t handle the links!”
  
  cross-referencing/>
- Guest
  
  I’d do it for free- if they’d send me up there! :D
ryunosuke

While light pollution is definitely a problem for stargazers, in reality the cities we see don’t shine as brightly as in the video. Each frame is a photograph taken with longer exposure than normal, meaning that more light is absorbed and comes out starker in the photo.

These cities are actually quite dim when seen with the naked eye, but it is nevertheless rather astonishing that we can see them at all.
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  Like showing people nebulae through a telescope, and they expect to see Hubble images. Only Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars are reliably impressive, even to the urban amateur astronomer. I have to think that there would be more support for the space program if more people experienced truly dark skies.
  
  Exposure, post-processing and light pollution aside, the effect is here is hypnotically beautiful.
GIFtheory

Obligatory spelling lesson: Colombia, not Columbia.
Guest

Beautiful. :3
General Specific

It’s probably because I’m a little bit drunk, but this made me tear up. So beautiful.
- penguinchris
  
  It did for me too, and I’m not drunk. Agree with previous poster who wondered why this hasn’t been done before!
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

Mind numbingly beautiful.

Glorious in every sense of the word.
http://twitter.com/aluminium85 Alex S

I think I saw my house!
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=833319037 Aleš Černigoj

The International Space Station can easily be spotted with the naked
eye. Because of its size (110m x 100m x 30m) it reflects very much
sunlight. The best time to observe the ISS is when it is night time at your
location, but the Space Station is sunlit. Such a situation occurs often
in the morning before sunrise or in the evening after sunset.
http://iss.astroviewer.net/index.php